Showing all newswire headlines

We’re glad you found Dell’s Ubuntu website. If you’re not familiar with Ubuntu, or would like to learn more you’ve come to the right place.

Quote: "Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows®
The vast majority of viruses and spyware written by hackers are not designed to target and attack Linux."

[This itself is an advertizement, not 'news'. and the link will probably go bad. However, the comparison they're making with Windows is interesting - hkwint]

This was something pretty much obvious, but now Mark Shuttleworth confirmed it: the Unity panel won't allow any kind of customizations. That means not only that you won't be able to add/edit applets like in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 (which could be easily "fixed"), but the user won't even be able to right click the applets to move them or whatever - nothing will happen upon right-clicking.

MeeGo is an Intel-sponsored Linux distribution designed for netbooks and other mobile devices (such as Nokia's extra-geeky N900 smartphone). We tested MeeGo on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook and were extremely impressed; we think it's seriously worth giving it a try on your mini-notebook, and maybe ditching Windows or a "normal" Linux distribution.

Flock — the so-called social web browser — has dumped its traditional Firefox core in favor of Chromium, the open source incarnation of Google's Chrome browser. CEO Shawn Hardin calls Flock 3 — released today as a public beta — the first major browser other than Chrome to use a Chromium base, and in making the switch, the Silicon Valley outfit is dumping nearly six years of history. The Flock dev team began building browsers from a Mozilla base in late 2004, which predates the arrival of Firefox 1.0. Before going to work on their eponymous social browser, the team helped develop Netscape 8.x, the first AOL Netscape browser based on Firefox.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. To use Conky, you must manually set it up - and that's not easy as you must manually create the configuration file and customize it yourself. But now you can do this a lot easier using ConkyWizard, a GUI written in Qt and C++ to set up Conky and customize everything visually.

Linux Mint is another distribution that seems designed for new users, although many seasoned users find it as handy as anyone. Linux Mint takes Ubuntu and makes it usable by adding drivers and codecs and adjusting the default application stack for more mainstream appeal. In addition, they customize the appearance for a more universal demographic. Mint isn't just a revamped Ubuntu. Its developers actually write tools and utilities to increase user-friendliness. Best of all, it's one of the few distros that can truly be considered "install and go." All these factors are surely why Mint has soared into the top 3 of Distrowatch's Page Hit Rankings.

After my last pronouncement that I had sound in Tiny Core, upon further examination I only had test sound out of OSS through my USB Headphone Set sound module. Real sound from applications eluded me in OSS. While creating a second user account in Ubuntu, I discovered by accident that my Toshiba laptop's long-dead internal sound module was somehow working. I tried Tiny Core again. I rolled in OSS and Flash and tried a YouTube video in the Minefield/Firefox 3.0.4 browser. It worked.

Neelie Kroes is no lightweight when it comes to open v. closed software. She spent six years as Europe's head trust-buster, and in that time, collected billions from proprietary software makers who sought to corner the market with their closed-source wares. When she spoke, big software — and everybody else — listened. In February, Ms. Kroes moved on from chasing down monopolists, becoming the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda — the EU's lead regulator of all things information technology. If her recent comments are any indication, she intends to continue her staunch opposition to proprietary software in her new position.

If you are looking for a rugged Android phone this may exactly be what you are looking for. This phone was originally build for windows mobile, but nowadays they also ship it with android. And I have to say, it actually looks nice for a rugged phone.

Canonical’s foray into the tablet arena is fundamentally different from both the iPad and a WebOS tablet, and unfortunately reeks of a company failing to learn from their competitors successes and failures. Here are four reasons why an Ubuntu tablet simply won’t work.

Google engineer John Koleszar asked the open source community for help optimizing the VP8 codec for the WebM project, Google's open source project for watching video online. In soliciting help, Koleszar gave a sort of State of the Codec Address regarding VP8, it's functionality and the headway he and his fellow programmers have made since the WebM announcement at Google I/O 2010.

Exactly two years ago I spoke about interoperability and standards here in Brussels.
Here is a brief overview:

• Interoperability boosts competition and we need more of that.
• For devices or applications to be interoperable - to work together - all concerned parties must agree to a common way of "doing things".
• Formal standards are one way to get there.
• More transparency in formal standard-setting can lead to more efficient outcomes.
• Public and private procurers of technology should be smart and build their systems as much as possible on standards that everybody can use and implement without constraints: this is good for the bottom-line because it promotes competition between suppliers and prevents vendor lock-in.

In other words, as I said on that occasion: choosing open standards is a very smart business decision. That speech brought a general perspective to my work on competition policy.
Today I must apply that thinking in a more direct way, as the person who has proposed the Digital Agenda for Europe. Even though the whole Commission is responsible for its implementation I expect interested parties to mostly turn to me to demand progress – and rightly so.
Therefore let me explain what I have in mind when it comes to the topics of interoperability and standards.

WebEden the online service where you can build your own website has today announced the release of hundreds of new website templates. This is in addition to the thousands of template, colour and font combinations already available within this website builder.

Open source electronics firm Liquidware has released a kit for attaching a 4.4-inch Liquidware BeagleTouch OLED touchscreen to a BeagleBoard to construct a Linux-based, tablet device. The Beagle Embedded Starter Kit also incorporates a BeagleJuice battery module and a 4GB SD card.

The PocketBook 301+ is actually a recent update of the original model released in 2007, itself based on a popular eReader design that’s been sold by various companies…

There was a talk last week at LinuxTag in Berlin by Egbert Eich about kernel mode-setting and the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) graphics stack on Linux. Egbert is, of course, a long-time X developer and openSUSE developer at Novell who was one of the masterminds behind the RadeonHD graphics driver and has worked on various pieces of X over the years. In Egbert's brief KMS talk he briefly covered the history of the Linux graphics stack, the user and kernel-space APIs for DRM mode-setting, and related topics. For those that missed out on his talk, below are his slides.

According to Henry Chesbrough1, Open Innovation consists of using external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, to advance a company's technology. Software architects and developers are usually not short of ideas, but which of those ideas are the really good ones? How do you select the winning options and avoid wasting energy and money on the useless ones?

Java father James Gosling has endorsed plans to juice managed runtimes on Linux from a company that was once at loggerheads with Sun Microsystems over his beloved language. Gosling has said he's "excited" by the Managed Runtime Initiative, which involves code contributions from Java appliance specialist Azul Systems, saying the effort will create the new functionality needed for managed runtimes to "continue their growth and evolution."

The long delay in releasing mobile phones running Windows Phone 7 is damaging Microsoft's mobile opportunity. It's been six months since Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer officially announced Windows Mobile 7, now called Windows Phone 7. And now, well and truly into the second-half of the year, Microsoft's answer to the iPhone and Google's Android OS is still nowhere to be seen.

Eucalyptus Systems — the open source outfit that mimics Amazon's so-called compute cloud inside private data centers — has released a major upgrade to its commercial product, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.0 includes support for Windows virtual machines, letting you hoist Windows Server 2003, 2008, and Windows 7 images atop a Eucalyptus cloud — not just Linux images — and it includes new billing, accounting, and user management tools. New CEO Marten Mickos — the former CEO of MySQL AB — also promises "improved scalability."